


Trapped (At Least Not in Carbonite)

by emynii, ObliObla



Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [1]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Broken Bones, Gen, Hurt Ella Lopez, Self-administered Medical Care, Whump, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 05:16:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20848127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: Sometimes hunches work out for the best. Sometimes they lead to being trapped in an elevator during an earthquake.For the Whumptober prompt: shaky hands





	Trapped (At Least Not in Carbonite)

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings are in the end notes. 
> 
> We've got fics planned for every day of Whumptober. We hope you join us on this whumpy, whumpy journey!

Ella’s hands are shaking when she tries to take her pulse. It’s rapid and thready and weak and her science-y words are failing her because she’s  _ freezing _ and she can’t seem to take a deep breath. The elevator sways a little on its cable, and though she knows the mechanism is incapable of allowing the cabin to fall—she sends a silent prayer up to Mr. Otis, patron saint of safety elevators—it’s little comfort.

Why did an earthquake have to hit when she was alone in some random building? And why did it have to hit when she was in the  _ elevator? _

She’d just wanted to test a theory. There was something off with Anderson’s calculated trajectories, and she’d headed to the crime scene to check. She’d been validated— _ woot! but, a small one, since she got stuck _ —and headed back down to the ground floor.

And then, earthquake.

Ella Lopez is a good Michigan girl; she doesn’t trust earthquakes as far as she (can’t) see them. Natural disasters should come from the sky in the form of lightning or blizzards, not out of the ground like a sandworm or a sarlacc, she’s certain. And…

Wait, what was she doing?

Oh! Calling 911. Right. Disaster means call 911.  _ Focus, Lopez, _ she tells herself.

She pulls her phone out of her pocket and blinks at the cracks and the shimmer of pulverized glass on the surface.  _ Awesome. _ But the screen still turns on, and she makes a quiet little  _ whoop _ that echoes awkwardly around the elevator cabin. She foregoes swiping the phone open for pressing the little emergency button on her lock screen, in case the sensitivity is messed up.

The phone rings; the sound is dull and dead in the silence punctured only by her slightly shuddering breaths. She’s  _ fine _ , she reassures herself as she waits. Just… her leg hurts a bit. That’s normal, when an earthquake hits and you fall over onto the ugly carpeted floor. And being cold just means her sweater—with bright pink characters  _ i <3 π  _ emblazoned on it—is clearly not thick enough for the cold… L.A…. winter? She shakes her head. She’s fine.

The call picks up.

“911, what’s your emergency?” The words are standard, but the woman sounds frazzled and anxious. It doesn’t make Ella feel much better.

“I-I got stuck in an elevator,” Ella says. Her voice is weirdly weak, but earthquakes freak her out, so that makes sense. Right?

“Where are you?” the woman asks, business-like, and Ella gets the impression that’s she’s normally a little more sympathetic.

She rattles off the address as her gaze gets caught on the gentle flickering of the emergency lights. It’s oddly distracting, and she realizes she’s drifted off a little, hand in the air, tracing the glare. She shakes herself again and concentrates on the voice on the phone.

Unfortunately, it’s bad news. “Emergencies services will send a team as soon as possible, but with the earthquake it may be delayed. Is anyone in immediate danger where you are?”

Ella shakes her head before remembering the woman can’t see her. “I think I’m fine,” she says, with bravado she doesn’t feel. And she is, right?

The woman offers to stay on the phone for longer, but Ella assures her everything’s  _ okay _ . She has more important things to do. And Ella’s  _ fine. _

She’s fine.

Is the elevator moving or is her head spinning? She slaps her hand against the wall, but still can’t tell. Her leg  _ really _ hurts, now she’s thinking about it. She glances down at it. There’s no blood on her jeans, so she’s probably alright. But maybe…

She blinks. Time seems to pass strangely, in jumps and jerks, but also thick and muddled. When she comes back to herself the pain seems worse, lightning sparking across her vision. She starts to wonder if she’s  _ not _ okay. She remembers, vaguely, that elevators have emergency call buttons. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to call back, stay on the line, have someone to talk to. She nods, grabs the railing, and pulls herself up.

Her leg, which is throbbing now in an aching, cramped kind of way, shrieks at her, and she collapses back to the ground, feeling, more than hearing, the crunch.

_ Oh. _

She isn’t fine at all, is she? She touches her leg, and pain shoots up her spine. She grits her teeth and pushes a little harder, trying to feel what’s wrong. Somewhere inside bone grinds against bone, and her head thuds hard against the wall as a wave of nausea washes over her.

She chokes back bile and realizes she’s broken out in a cold sweat. She drifts for a while, again, shivering, running her fingers down the side of her gear bag over and over. The texture is a little rough, and it grounds her, eventually.

_ Her phone. _

She scrambles for it and turns the screen on, but freezes, thumb inches from the emergency button. They aren’t going to come for a long time, if at all, and they don’t have time to deal with a random, freaked out Ella. She unlocks the screen and navigates to the call app. But who can help her?

_ Focus, Ella, _ she tells herself desperately.  _ What do you need? _

She knows she’s going into shock, or has  _ gone _ into shock, judging by the weakness of her heartbeat, the nausea, and the confusion. So she’s lost blood flow, probably because of the break. And to fix it…

She needs a doctor.

Her thumb presses down on the contact name before her brain can catch up. It rings, and rings, and rings.

“Ella?” a confused voice asks. She tries to respond but can’t quite get her mouth to move. Linda continues, “Did you feel that earthquake? We got a little shaken up here.”

“I…”

“Ella, are you alright?”

Ella exhales shakily and slumps further against the wall. “I don’t… I don’t think I am.”

Linda says something, but she only catches the end of it: “…are you?”

“Elevator,” she says, now staring at the prism of colors refracting from the broken glass.

“Are you hurt? Are you… Ella, are you—?”

“I think I broke my leg.” The lights flash again. The cabin shudders. She imagines falling. Falling and falling and falling, rows and rows of teeth coming up to meet her out of the darkness. Or maybe she’d just never,  _ ever _ land.

“Ella, I-I don’t speak Spanish, are you…?”

_ Spanish? _ Ella wasn’t…

She replays the moment in her head as best she can. The words had  _ been _ English, she’s certain, but her lips had formed around the wrong syllables:  _ creo que me rompí la pierna. _

She blinks. “I-I mean my leg’s broke. I fell and it made a… And it  _ hurts _ . It hurts  _ so much. _ ”

It’s the same leg, she realizes, as her head lolls back, the phone slipping from her fingers. It’s the same leg she broke before, in the car accident, when—

“It’s going to be okay, Ella.” Linda’s voice cuts through the haze, and Ella’s dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the present. “Have you called 911?”

“They said they’d come, but they… but I’m… low priority.”

She hears Linda exhale slowly. “Okay. Can you do something for me?”

“Yeah?” Ella breathes, tightening her hand around the phone. She can’t lose it. It’s all she has.

“Uh… What is there? What  _ is _ there? Ella, can you tell me what you have around you?”

“What do I—? I-I don’t have anything,” Ella stammers. She can’t breathe, can’t hardly think. The light from her screen seems to flicker. What’ll happen when it dies?

“Yes, you do.  _ Focus _ for me.” Linda seems calm, but Ella can hear the edge of panic in her voice, and it only feeds her own. She can hear glass shattering, shouting, can smell blood in the air, and metal. But she knows it isn’t real, and she pushes past it.

“Phone, wallet, keys… My-my kit?

“Good!” Linda praises, and Ella wonders idly if she was taught this weirdly positive voice in med… in med… in doctor school. “Good, that’s good. That’s… Do you have anything like scissors?”

Ella frowns and reaches for the bag. It takes a concerning amount of effort to put her hand in the bag and rummage around, her fingers fastening around the handle. She doesn’t remember why the shears are still in there, but she glances at the ceiling and whispers a half-halting  _ gracias _ in prayer.

“I’ve got ‘em,” she says to Linda, and hears her sigh in relief.

“Okay, can you cut your pants up from the hem?” Even Linda sounds like she knows this is a bad idea, and Ella takes a moment to throw an incredulous look at her phone.

“Uh, maybe…?”

“You can do this, Ella,” Linda says, and, for some reason, Ella believes her.

It doesn’t exactly hurt to lean over, and Ella is deeply grateful, slipping the fabric of her jeans between the shear blades. She snips slowly and steadily upward, as carefully as she can. She’s most of the way there, only a few inches from her knee, when the metal presses against her leg, and she hears a scream vibrate against the walls she only vaguely recognizes as her own voice. The shears fall from her hands and clatter on the floor.

“Ella!” Linda shouts over the line. “Ella, are you okay?”

Nausea rises again, and Ella falls to the side, vomiting acid onto the carpet. She wheezes and heaves and her body jerks, including her leg, whiting out her vision and filling her ears with cotton.

The seatbelt is tight against her throat, and she can’t breathe. She claws at it, but it won’t release. Everything is dark, or too bright, and her legs are pinned. She can’t move. She’s trapped.

Someone is crying.

The cloying odor of puke is strong in her nose, and she realizes  _ she’s _ the one quietly weeping on the floor. Linda is still yelling from wherever the phone fell, and Ella sniffs, wiping at her face with her cleaner hand. The pain in her leg has subsided to a dull throb, and she drags herself up to sit.

She picks up the phone, still panting lightly. “I’m okay,” she manages.

“Oh, thank  _ god _ ,” Linda says. She clearly means to continue, but Ella cuts her off.

“Tell me what to do next.”

“But… Are you—?”

“ _ Please _ .”

“Okay,” Linda says, swallowing audibly. “Okay, can…can you see where the break is now?”

Ella parts the fabric as much as she can. Her leg is mottled purple and yellow, oddly distorted along the line of the bones, and she swears she can  _ see _ the waves of pain that keep crashing over her. “Yeah,” she says quietly.

“Is there blood?”

“No.”

“Okay, so no possibility of infection. So…so now we need to set the bone.” Ella hears tapping, and she wonders if Linda is looking up what to do even as they talk.

What if Linda gets it wrong? What if  _ Ella _ gets it wrong? What if she stabs an artery with a shard of bone and bleeds out all over the ugly, godforsaken carpet? She can see the blood, even as her vision starts to gray, can see it rising and rising like an Egyptian plague or Carrie or like…like the elevator in The Shining. That hotel blew up—could this building blow up? Who knew what sort of things happened after earthquakes—and  _ earthquakes! _ The ground shifting beneath her feet, opening its gaping, hungry mouth and swallowing—

“Are you with me, Ella?” 

Ella swallows nervously. “I-I’m here.”

“You need something soft like gauze, something to brace the leg, and-and tape.”

Ella digs into her kit again, retrieving a roll of tape and a few telescoping trajectory rods. Thank  _ god _ the precinct’s never gotten around to buying proper laser levels. She stares into the depths of the bag for a second before pulling her sweater over her head.

“I’ve got it,” she says. And they get to work.

Ella used to watch MacGyver as a kid, on her grandparents’ old wooden set with the grainy black-and-white image and the ears you had to bend at ridiculous angles to get a signal on. It inspired her love for puzzles, for finding the solution, even if it was unconventional.

After this, she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to watch it again.

She’s biting her lip hard enough to draw blood trying to keep from crying, eyes narrowed in all the concentration she can manage while the emergency lights threaten to die. But every time she focuses too hard, her brain starts catching on scenarios she’s no longer certain of the likelihood of.

She sticks the rods through her sweater and imagines sliding them under her fingernails, an old torture technique she saw in a kung fu movie once, with its awesome action and awful voice synching and—

She shakes her head and ends up shaking her whole body, jostling her leg enough she has to choke back a scream.  _ Focus. _

She goes to wrap the fabric around the wound and hisses. Her leg looks  _ terrible _ , worse and worse the longer she watches, but she  _ has _ to look. Has to see the discolored flesh, mangled and distorted like it’s being torn apart from the inside. Will a xenomorph burst out of it if she pokes it too hard? Or the chest-bursting parasites from TNG? Or maggots? Maybe she’s already d—?

_ No _ . She has to do this. She has to be as brave as Jean Luc, as resourceful as Riker, as analytical as Data, as strong as Troi.

She wraps the sweater around the skin with as much clinical detachment as she can manage. It’s just another vic’s broken and bruised leg. She tries not to imagine how cold it would be, to die. How bodies bloat and stink and decompose. How their friends and families cry together, but they’re so,  _ so _ alone.

But she’s  _ not _ alone. She has to believe that. She  _ does _ believe that. She looks up at the ugly orange lights and whispers, “I need your help, big guy.  _ Please. _ ” The lights flicker again. She nods.

She’s got the tape in her hand when Linda stops her with a warning. “This is going to  _ hurt _ .”

“It already hurts,” Ella grunts. Darkness swims in front of her eyes; she ignores it.

“You-you’re going to have to line the bone back up, Ella,” she explains, the phone back on the floor, voice more strained than it’s been the entire time. “And it might—” She inhales sharply. “It might be broken in several places, so-so pull it.  _ Tight. _ ”

The sound of the tape tearing is terribly loud in the relative quiet. “I can do this,” Ella says. “I can do this. I can do this.”

“You can do this,” Linda echoes.

_ Hurt _ isn’t a strong enough word for the agony that burns through her veins, slicing into her like knives of ice. Her eyelids slam shut involuntarily, and her teeth clench. She can taste blood in her mouth. The sound torn from her throat is completely unrecognizable as her own voice, even as  _ human. _ It’s a crazed animal, raging against the dying of the light.

But the bone scrapes and shudders back together, and the brace is tight against her skin.

She whines through harsh breaths, head falling against the wall. Her hair is soaked with sweat and has fallen out of her ponytail and into her face. “ _ Think I got it _ ,” she says roughly.

Linda sniffs. “That’s good, Ella. That’s really good.”

Ella might sleep for a week if it weren’t for the continuing pain, somewhat subsided, but still clawing at her insides and making her feel sick. She picks up the phone with the last of her strength and sets it on the thigh of her uninjured leg. “Thanks, Linda.”

Linda hisses out an anxious breath, and Ella hears someone on the other end of the line talking indistinctly. Linda replies, “I don't know, she hasn't told me. She called 911, though… Ella? Where are you? We can—”

The phone goes dead. The emergency lights go out. And Ella is alone in the dark and the silence.

There are shadows at the edge of her vision, and they leap out at her. They’re not real, they’re  _ not _ , but she can’t ignore them anymore. She doesn’t have a flashlight to show there’s no monster under the bed. Linda doesn’t know where she is. And the other people… maybe they aren’t coming. Maybe no one is coming.

She was alone then, too, the blare of the horn the only thing she could hear. Trapped and scared and all by herself. But then someone  _ had _ come, a ghost or an angel—she doesn’t know. Maybe she’ll never  _ really  _ know. But she saved her.

Ella coughs and looks upward; even though she can’t see, she still has to have faith. “Okay, big guy, it’s just you and me now. Don’t let me down.”

Yea though she walks through the valley of the shadow of death, she must not fear. For fear is the mind-killer. She presses her fingernails into her palms and breathes through the worst of the panic. She  _ will _ get rescued. Someone  _ will _ come.

And when they do, when they come to pull her out of this elevator, she’s going to be her normal peppy, cheery self. She’s going to be Ella again, not a scared little girl that still sees her own blood dripping from the headrest of the seat in front of her when she closes her eyes.

She’s going to great them with sunshine and rainbows and slightly awkward hugs.

She’s going to…

There’s a screeching sound as metal grinds against metal, and Ella wakes abruptly, jerking against the wall. The elevator doors are pulling open, but she doesn’t have the energy to moan in pain, let alone smile. The light of the flashlight is harsh and blinding, and she shuts her eyes again. But someone’s here.

Someone’s here and she’s going to be okay.

She wonders if an empty, gently swaying elevator will join the car crash in her dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings: Blood, mild claustrophobia, flashbacks, vomiting


End file.
